Oscars 2012: "Moneyball"

"Moneyball"

The general manager of the Oakland A's - one of the poorest teams in baseball - introduces unorthodox methods to pull together a winning team in this true-life tale of sports and statistics. The Columbia Pictures release was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

By CBSNews.com senior editor David Morgan

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"Moneyball"

"There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve." - Bill James

Bill James was a night security guard in the late 1970s when he began writing on baseball, using a statistical approach he devised called sabermetrics. He created new calculations of a ball player's performance based not on batting average or RBIs, but rather how frequently a batter reached base, or how many runs he helped his team score even if he himself didn't make it home.

Major league baseball was not quick to pick up on his ideas because, well, baseball saw no need to.

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"Moneyball"

As recounted in the book "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" by Michael Lewis, Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane became a staunch believer in sabermetrics, and used a statistical basis to re-value and hire ball players that could compete against a club with a payroll several times larger.

"Moneyball" shows how the obsession of Beane (played by Brad Pitt) was just as much a matter of personal pride and a desire to win, as it was an attack on an outmoded belief system that, in a way, contributed to his own failure as a major league prospect many years earlier.

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"Moneyball"

Beane's advocacy of sabermetrics comes partly out of necessity. His front office could not (or would not) pony up the multi-million dollar paychecks that big market teams (like the New York Yankees) were showering on players - and in some cases stealing away Oakland's biggest stars.

BEANE: "The problem we're trying to solve is that this is an unfair game. There are rich teams, poor teams, 50 feet of crap, and then there's us. And now we've been gutted. We're organ donors to the rich. The Red Sox took our kidneys and the Yankees took our heart."

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"Moneyball"

While visiting the front office of the Cleveland Indians for some horse trading (okay, player trading), Beane is struck by the presence of a functionary whose whispered guidance throws a wrench into his negotiations.

"Moneyball"

PETER: "Baseball thinking is medieval. It's stuck in the Dark Ages. . . . People who run baseball teams still think in terms of buying players. The goal shouldn't be to buy players, what you want to buy is wins. To buy wins, you buy runs."

Beane quizzes him on his ideas - and soon after hires him as his assistant GM.

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"Moneyball"

Brand explains his statistical logic to Beane, showing in a flurry of equations how the A's can build a winning ball club with players no one else wants - an "island of misfit toys" - and cheaply, because other teams would not value players the same way and steal them with inflated contract offers.

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"Moneyball"

But the Oakland scouting staff has never operated that way, and is not about to now. Beane has to remind them who is boss, but now the onus is on him to produce wins.

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"Moneyball"

To replace his star fielders who have been lured away by bigger paychecks elsewhere, Beane turns to washed-up catcher Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), whose elbow injury means he'll never be behind home plate again. But Beane sees him as the answer to filling his first baseman position, despite the cynicism of his scout Washington (Brent Jennings):

"Moneyball"

Beane's backstory is that at age 18 he was a promising draft pick for the New York Mets and signed up, forgoing a full scholarship at Stanford. After several miserable seasons of major league and Triple-A ball, Beane left the field, but not the game - becoming the only major league general manager who had actually PLAYED in the majors.

Yet the pressures of winning were compounded by a desire to make up for the failures of his early performance. Beane took his team's performance so seriously he could not allow himself to even WATCH the games, or listen on the radio, preferring to have Peter text him the play-by-play.

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"Moneyball"

Billy's personal life - like his general manager career - is a matter of trying to make do with a less-than-optimal situation, such as sharing parenting duties with his ex-wife Sharon (Robin Wright) and her well-meaning but baseball-deficient husband Alan (an uncredited Spike Jonze).

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"Moneyball"

His daughter Casey (Kerris Dorsey) is someone who looks out for Beane, to his paternal annoyance:

"Moneyball"

Part of Peter's education as assistant general manager is the unpleasant task of informing a player that he has been traded, which Beane tries to make as clean as possible:

BEANE: "These are professional baseball players. You just do it. Peter, I need to let you go. Jack's office'll handle the paperwork." PETER: "That's it?" BEANE: "Would you rather get one bullet in the head or five in the chest and bleed to death?" PETER: "Those are my only choices?"

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Philip Seymour Hoffman

Philip Seymour Hoffman ("Capote") stars as A's manager Art Howe, who resists not just the notion of sabermetrics but also Beane's efforts to micro-manage the team's lineup card. Even coming off of a 102-game-winning season, the loss of his key players has made him fear for his own job - and cannot abide his GM's efforts to usurp his years of managing experience.

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Stephen Bishop

Stephen Bishop plays David Justice, an aging player whom Beane asks to mentor his younger, less disciplined teammates.

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"Moneyball"

Peter also goes over hours of game tapes with the players to explain counter-intuitive lessons, such as: Don't swing on the first pitch, no matter what, because a strike on the first pitch reduces one's batting average, while a ball increases it. It also helps wears out the pitcher: The more pitches thrown, the weaker and more prone to mistakes the opposition will be.

Just as Billy and Peter are trying to re-teach an organization how to operate, they are trying to re-teach athletes with years of experience how NOT to play. Old dog, meet new trick.

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"Moneyball"

Sports films typically suffer from predictability - we KNOW the boxer will win in the end, the team will triumph, the jockey will cross the finish line first, the underdogs will come out on top. Anything less would not fly. This predictability defines the divide between rooting for sports and watching sports movies.

When dealing with a game whose outcome is already known, a film audience can't be made to care whether the heroes win or lose; instead, the focus of the film must be on whether the heroes transform themselves (or others).

The key to "Moneyball"'s success is following whether Billy Beane's efforts change the way the game is played, or whether the "bad guys" will rule at the end of a most unorthodox season. Even more intriguing is whether Beane can somehow exorcise whatever demons he may have regarding his failed playing career.

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"Moneyball"

First optioned for the movies in 2003, "Moneyball" faced two daunting challenges: Sports films have historically done poorly at the box office; and movies about statistics have probably done worse.

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Brad Pitt

Originally developed with director David Frankel and then Steven Soderbergh, the film latched onto A-list star Brad Pitt, who also became one of the producers. The original screenwriter Stan Chervin was replaced by Steven Zaillian (an Oscar winner for "Schindler's List").

But the studio put the brakes on shortly before production in June 2009. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (an Oscar winner for "The Social Network") came in to pinch hit, and a new director, Bennett Miller ("Capote"), took over.

"This movie died on the vine, or almost died on the vine several times," Pitt told CBS News. "And we had to resuscitate it!"

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Brad Pitt

As Pitt told CBS News' Charlie Rose, his own obsession to get the film made mirrored the story's central obsessive character:

"You look at the Billy Beane character, he had been completely devalued by his sport. He was playing for a small market team and had to rethink the game, and had to question why we had been doing the things we do for so long, and in doing so, found this whole other talent pool of other people who had been devalued, and they started winning games."

Pitt said he was attracted to Beane's drive to make things more fair, "to find a level playing field - If we're gonna compete, let's make it fair. And I'm a bit of a justice nut."

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Jonah Hill

As Peter Brand, Jonah Hill received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Best known for his comic roles, Hill's credits include "The 40 Year Old Virgin," "Superbad," "Knocked Up," "Cyrus," "The Invention of Lying," "Get Him to the Greek," "Funny People," "The Sitter" and "21 Jump Street," as well as vocal performances in "Megamind" and "How to Train Your Dragon."